rocknload | (no subject)

YOU KNOW, I WAS ACTUALLY THINKING ABOUT SOMETHING SIMILAR EARLIER TODAY. I realized that some of the most successful movies/genres/etc involve the extermination of the human race, or the near extermination of the human race resting on either one hero, or a small group of people. I'm genuinely curious to know if people want to be exterminated, or want to save the world. OR MAYBE THEY JUST HATE EVERYONE AND WANT TO BE THE LAST PERSON LEFT. I don't know, but now that I've thought about it, it is kind of odd.

BINARY DISTINCTIONS.

ITCHY.

I really think it's a combination of different things. The soulless automatons is a good point, but I think there's additionally the "undead" thing has a lot to do with it. There's a combination of a fear of things which are gone coming back combined with a tragedy of people who we love coming back as mindless, flesheating monsters. Not to mention it's crossing a "line" -- we put so much effort into remembering the people as they were, that seeing them decomposing like that would be horrifying.

Plus there's the whole predation aspect. We humans aren't used to being below another thing on the food chain.

I think it's the fear of a worldview change.

Not everyone fears zombies. Some people think they're sexy.

I don't fucking know why.

I don't know. I've never really put much thought into it because I'm not a huge fan of zombies one way or the other.

Shaun of the Dead was awesome, though. 8D;

Probably the fact that it violates so many taboos, and disrupts the natural order of things. (For most cultures) life has rules: people die and are gone for good. People don't eat other people (unless you're living in a few of those groups in South America where prions run rampant). Nature tends towards relative balance (no one species completely dominates the world; for all our technological achievement and ingenuity, if a bear wanders into town, all hell will still break loose).

AND THEN SUDDENLY ZOMBIES. It's like a buffet of primal fears! There's a little something for everyone!

Well, what you have in the poll has something to do with it, probably. That and people probably just like seeing gross shit.

I think it's a combination of things. What you mentioned above factors in a lot, as well as the "sheeple" thing. However, I think it's also a "what has science wrought" fear, too.

If you look at it, most of the great archetypical fears of Western culture play upon science gone amok or science more advanced than we can comprehend - AI, genetic engineering, aliens, dystopias, etc. Many types of zombies play into that same theme - they are created from science gone wrong. A lot of it strikes me as a fear that humans are meddling in things we should not, and that one day we will step over the line and cause out own demise. I'm not saying this fear is logical, but it certainly is out there - look at all the fear stemming from the large hadron collider earlier this year.

...

This is exactly what we covered in our zombie section of Supernatural Fiction Class.

There's even a scholarly article in our course packet.